The Around.Us Application Elevates Travel Experiences with an Innovative Approach to Exploration

A playful and easy-to-use application based on cartography

The Around.Us application streamlines user searches through an interactive map, showcasing the top 10 points of interest near their location worldwide. To explore these popular places, various options are available, such as geolocation, searching by location, or using keywords. Whether navigating a city, neighborhood, or street, Around.Us provides a list of the 10 nearest major points of interest, focusing on the essentials.

"This idea occurred to me during a stay in Carnac, in Brittany. I wanted to show my children a dolmen. By typing that word into Google, I got 15 creperies as results. As for Google Maps, it did provide me with a list of megalithic tombs, but it was impossible to know which one was the most interesting," explains the creator of the application, Jean-François Pillou, also the founder of the website CommentCaMarche and the director of CCM Benchmark, Journal Du Net, and Linternaute (Figaro Group). He aims to offer new perspectives and ease of discovery to all travelers looking beyond the ordinary.

Uncovering hidden treasure

Beyond the must-see attractions, the application reveals a multitude of lesser-known monuments and sites. With its 16,000 filters, everyone can embark on discovering local heritage, natural sites, or forgotten monuments: from fountains to train stations, museums to haunted houses, suspension bridges to remarkable trees, and public gardens. Curious explorers around the world can enjoy locating these attractions. Around.Us references over 12 million selected sites, selected and ranked according to their popularity on a scale of 1 to 5 flames. This ensures visitors don't miss major sites and also sparks interest in more secretive locations.

The enriched content of the application allows users to use it as a genuine travel guide. When a user clicks on the bubble or the frame of the place of interest, they discover a detailed sheet with its history, anecdotes, practical information, exact location, and a link to the website. Synthesized through an algorithm, the information is updated daily.

Enhancing the Journey for Indian Users

The creation of Around.Us was fueled by a desire to enhance the travel experience for adventurous travellers, setting it apart from traditional map applications such as Google Maps and Apple Maps. The application concentrates on the top 10 points of interest useful from a tourist perspective, providing a curated list that enriches travel experiences in a particular location.

India has emerged as a key user base, contributing to almost 150,000 out of the ever growing 750,000 downloads. Currently the number of daily users from India ranges between 3000 and 5000 users, accounting for around 20% of the 15-25K daily users globally.

Strong engagement has been seen from cities such as Patna, Lucknow, Indore, Nagpur, Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Agra, Hyderabad, Kochi, and Guwahati that are home to lesser-known monuments and sights with historical and cultural significance.

Expanding the Horizon

The application now features an impressive 12 million points of interest, including panoramic viewpoints, making virtually every city in India navigable through the Around.Us application. There are currently 97,000 tourist points of interest in India, including 27,000 geographical locations and 2,700 areas with heritage designations (World Heritage Sites, Monuments of National Importance, State Protected Monuments).

Community-Driven Curation

The curation process for the Around.Us application involves a proprietary algorithm, and in the future, the application plans to leverage its user community to further enrich the database with new locations, data, visuals, and videos. This community-driven approach ensures the application’s continuous improvement in utility and accuracy while continuously engaging the travellers it caters to.

Around.Us in numbers:

· Available in 8 languages

· Downloaded over 750,000 times since its launch in June

· 12 million monuments listed

· Between 10,000 and 20,000 sumultaneous users

· 250,000 requests per day

· 200,000 unique visitors in September 2023

· 16,000 keywords

About Around.Us

Around.Us is a free, interactive, and user-friendly 2.0 travel guide that helps its users, both while traveling and in daily life, in locating monuments and natural sites around them or anywhere on the globe. The application lists major must-see sites all over the world. It will become the go-to partner for travelers eager to easily find the points of interest around them in a blink of an eye.

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